State School Builds Own Chapel

Cuttings from the Sunday Times

June 5th 1960 from John Glenister

A Grammar School Gets Its Chapel

ewes Boy's Grammar School will use its chapel for the first
time on Wednesday. Lewes is the first maintained school to build
one. The Bishop of Chichester, Dr. Roger Wilson, is to dedicate
the chapel next month

Public funds cannot be used for chapels, so the cost of this
one had to be met from private pockets. But the soaring prices
were always ahead of the money collected. Early ideas of economy
through voluntary labour were quashed by the experts as soon as
they were put into practice. Amateurs, it seems, can dig a
swimming bath - as the Lewes boys had done - but not build a
chapel. Yet finally, when the original estimate of £10,000
had more than doubled, there was actually enough in the fund.

Standing in the chapel, Mr. Bradshaw said to me: "With these
lovely furnishings and the renovation of the organ, which is away
under restoration, the total bill will approach £26,000. By
the Dedication day - the chapel is for all denominations, so it
is to be be dedicated, not consecrated - we shall only be about
£500 short."

Late 1950's from Freddie Cosstick

State School is Building Chapel of Its Own

e were standing in the mud looking down at some newly dug
trenches. In the distance boys in blue jerseys were scrumming
with gusto."And here, you see," said the headmaster, "will be the
chancel."

Everyone who has read "Tom Brown's Schooldays" knows (even
allowing for the romantised portrait Hughes drew of Arnold) what
the school chapel meant to Rugby. But local education committees
do not budget for school chapels. So when Mr. N. R. J. Bradshaw,
headmaster of Lewes County Grammar School, decided to build one
he knew he would have to raise the money himself.

The prospect did not daunt this quiet, courteous, grey-haired
man with the glint of revolutionary ideas behind his spectacles.
He believes that the public schools should continue and thrive
independently, but that, given scope there is nothing they can do
which State schools cannot do too. The long list of open
scholarships won by his boys to Oxford and Cambridge and the old
programme he keeps in his study, bought at Iffley Road when two
of his boys played on the same day for their university, bear
testimony to his faith.

The Voluntary Plan

One of his experiments was a voluntary scheme under which 50
boys stayed behind when school ended at 4 p.m. For the first hour
they played games, browsed in the library or listened to records.
Then they had an excellent tea.

" It should be remembered that to a schoolboy, tea is a
substantial meal and not merely a social interlude " the
headmaster commented. Then came two hours' prep, and the boys
left for home at 8 p.m. It was all an immense success (though the
sixth form withheld from the scheme because they thought two
hours' work insufficient). The boys went home carefree their work
behind them, and parents did not feel inhibited from radio or TV
programmes. Above all, the headmaster felt that indefinable
spirit which comes only from living together growing in his
school.

Then during the war his most ambitious project took shape in
his mind. In 1935 his boys had dug the foundations for their own
swimming bath. Why should they not also help to build their own
chapel? It would be a memorial to old boys of the school who had
fallen in the war and a tangible expression of the public-school
spirit he was trying to encourage. If the scheme succeeded, Lewes
would be the first State school in Britain to have its own
chapel.

The county architect drew up an elegant set of plans and the
total cost was estimated at £10,000. To raise it, the boys
built ricks on the school fields and sold them to a local corn
merchant. They kept geese, rabbits and pigs. Tommy Handley and
Gilbert Harding opened fetes.

After school the boys -- all volunteers -- set about the
digging with a will. " I don't let them dig for more than
three-quarters of an hour," says the headmaster. Then with a
twinkle "they think it's for their sakes. But as a matter of fact
that's all I can manage myself." For he digs with the best of
them.

The Economic Factor

But the stark facts of twentieth-century economics have dogged
his enterprise. Today the chapel fund stands at nearlv
£12,000 -- but since 1942 building cost's have nearly
trebled, and now the lowest tender for the work is
£29,000.

For a dozen years, in term and out, he has raised £20
every week -- a formidable figure when one remembers that his
oldest old boys are still in their thirties, so that large
private donations are out of the question.

Clearly, either the remainder of the money must be found from
some outside source, or the chapel scheme will have to be
radically modified. One suggestion is that a combined chapel and
assembly hall will have to do. That will not be the same thing,
of course. But whatever happens, one can be sure that the shade
of Thomas Arnold looks down benignlv on Mr. Bradshaw and his boys
digging after school down into the wet Sussex earth in pursuit of
something which is not budgeted for even in our enlightened
Welfare State.